


Blue Eyes and Fairy Lights

by PoisonWrites



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Fluff, M/M, Roommates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-09 03:10:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5523209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PoisonWrites/pseuds/PoisonWrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dan needs a date to his parents' Christmas party, and quickly. Who better to accompany him than his introverted, coffee-addled university roommate, Phil Lester? Well, probably anyone, but Dan kind of has no choice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blue Eyes and Fairy Lights

**Author's Note:**

> Happy holidays everyone! Here's a little fluff as a present from me to you!
> 
> Enjoy~ xx

“Okay, what?” Phil asked, looking up from his laptop. He was hauled up on the other side of their shared dorm, something that looked like a video editing program flashing on the screen.

“Please,” Dan repeated, clutching the phone he had just been on at his side, “be my boyfriend.”

“At least take me to dinner first,” the older boy rolled his eyes, turning back to his computer. He tapped a few of the keys, and the program disappeared off the screen.

“Not like that,” Dan sighed, flopping back onto his twin mattress. He stared up at the ceiling, faced with the image of his University’s logo tacked in place. His side of the room was clean and neat; a black duvet, several university posters, and stationary neatly organized on his desk. Nothing like his room back home, where he left his Muse posters and game consoles behind in favor of thick law books. University was going to be a fresh start, a time for him to grow up. At least, that’s what he promised himself.

“Then how?” Phil swiveled back around in his desk chair. There was something to be said about Phil’s side of the room, filming equipment strewn about just as haphazardly as his laundry. It matched his appearance though, tussled black hair and glasses that always seemed a bit off kilter. Phil perpetually smelled of coffee, which was how he stayed alive, Dan guessed. He swore up and down to his friends he never saw the older man sleep.

“I…” He sat up to look Phil in the eyes, and then looked away, towards a poster of Phil’s that Dan was too shy to mention he recognized. Pokemon was a bit childish, and definitely not the image he was going for, not in college. “I told my parents I had a boyfriend to get out of going to their Christmas party.”

Phil raised an eyebrow, but didn’t say anything. Well, he scoffed, but knowing Phil, it might as well have been an ill-timed cough. He never knew.

“I didn’t want to go in the first place, but my mom kept nagging and nagging, and so I just blurted out, as I do,” okay, that time Phil definitely scoffed, “well if you want me to come, you better be okay with me bringing my boyfriend.”

Both of Phil’s eyebrows were at his hairline by now, eyes wide and looking both horrified and amused, “Yikes.”

Dan dropped his head into his hands, “I know.”

There was a moment of silence between the two whilst Dan composed himself, before he looked back up from his hands, “I didn’t expect her to get all excited and actually want me to bring a guy. I thought she would, I don’t know, hang up on me and I would call back on boxing day begging for forgiveness.”

“And now you’re one boyfriend short of looking like an ungrateful arse in front of your parents, yeah?” Phil asked.

Dan nodded, defeated, “Yeah.”

Phil seemed pensive, but only for a brief second before, “There is no way I am jumping in front of that bullet.”

“Oh, come on, please? You’re one of the only guys I know who would agree to this, all my other friends…” he trailed off.

“All your other friends what?” There was a caution in Phil’s voice, something restrained and steadied with great care.

There was a loose string on the end of Dan’s uni hoodie, and he tugged at it in favor of looking Phil in the eyes, “My other friends…don’t know that I’m bi…” There was the sound of Phil breathing out on the other side of the room, a soft sigh. Dan didn’t know what that meant.

“And, like, I remember you were dating a guy at the beginning of the year, whatever his name was, so I figured…” He felt himself flushing, “I figured you would, maybe, be alright with pretending to be my boyfriend.”

Phil turned his chair back to his computer, clicking a few things while Dan tried not to feel dejected. After a minute, “Do my laundry for a month.”

Dan’s head flew up from staring at his black duvet, “Done!”

“And you get to clean the bathroom for the rest of the school year.”

“Got it. Anything you want. Anything else?”

Phil shrugged, eyes still on his computer, “That’s all. So when is this happening?”

“Uh,” Dan paused, realizing he totally forgot to mention that tiny detail, “this Saturday?”

“That’s in two days!” Phil spun around, nearly knocking over the tiny succulent he kept on his desk, “I’m supposed to figure out how to be your boyfriend in two days?”

Dan kicked his foot against the rough, dorm carpet, “I figured we could just wing it?”

Phil huffed, “You better be damn good at improv, Dan” and Dan agreed. He crossed his fingers and prayed things would work out.

—

Dan had never really taken the time to get to know Phil like a normal roommate should. On his first day of college, as he moved in, the room had been empty save for the skeletons of used furniture. He spent the entire day waiting for his roommate to show up, packing his possessions away into neat spaces while thinking of how to introduce himself.

By the time Dan decided to introduce himself by explaining his major, a loud thump was heard outside his door, followed by the jingling of keys. The door flew open, and in came a man only slightly shorter than Dan, tugging in a beat up suitcase and several duffle bags.

“Hey, so I’m Phil.” He said, throwing his bags onto the unmade bed, “I’m 22, senior, and I guess I’m your new roommate.”

Dan had balked at the concept. A senior? With him, a freshman? The last time he checked, he was rooming with some guy named Errol, who just so happened to be his age. There must have been a mix-up, because there was no way a senior would want to live in the first year dorms.

“Aren’t you a little old to be rooming here?” He asked, and really, that was his winning first line. In that split second, he calculated all the possible ways of escape in the room.

“I was supposed to have a single all to myself in the upperclass hall, but there was a mix-up with the paperwork and I missed the deadline. Lucky for me,” deadpan, “your roommate dropped out at the last minute, so here I am. Lucky.”

It was obvious then that Phil didn’t want to be his roommate just as much as Dan didn’t want to be his. That was also the most conversation the two shared in the first month. Phil would bring over his boyfriend, and Dan would go out and sleep on the couches of friends; they had a system. The second month wasn’t much better, but there were more words exchanged and less grunting. That’s why, when Phil pointed out that that day was the most they had ever talked to one another whilst getting ready over their shared sink, Dan sighed.

“Actually…yeah, yeah you’re right” Dan laughed, mostly out of disbelief. This was the most ridiculous stunt he had pulled in a long time.

“A close second is the time you stepped in my leftover pizza at 3am” Phil chuckled, combing his hair back. He was in black slacks and a white undershirt, a dark blue button up and a black tie thrown over his desk chair. Dan was already dressed, and he shifted in his place on his mattress, legs crossed as he buttoned the cuffs on his red dress shirt.

“Ugh, God, that was disgusting,” Dan moaned, recalling the incident, “I smelled like pepperoni for a week.”

“Believe me, you let me know…for about two hours straight that night.”

“Psh,” Dan brushed off his complaints, as light as they were. Really, who wouldn’t be upset to step in pizza in the middle of the night?

“Can you tie this for me?” Came Phil’s voice a minute later. He had disappeared inside the wall cutout that hid their closets, making Dan unable to see him. He moved to the other side of the room, bringing Phil back into view and adjusting his collar.

“Are you really so helpless?” He asked, but there was no venom behind the words. He hoped Phil could tell.

“Hey now, don’t make me add on doing my dishes to this agreement,” Phil said back, but there was a small smile on his lips.

  
Dan finished looping the tie around itself, and he smoothed it down onto Phil’s chest before taking a step back. The tie had been the same color as Dan’s, which gave them a synchronized appearance. All the better to convince his parents.

“You clean up nice,” he acknowledged, hovering over his roommate’s face, glasses-free and hair pushed back. He had very blue eyes, so blue that Dan wondered how he had missed them. He looked away.

“You too…” Dan could feel Phil’s eyes on him, but he chose to step away, grabbing his wallet.

“So the train leaves soon, we better hurry up.”

“Right” Phil agreed, and after one last look in the mirror, they both left.

—

“Dan!” a woman opened the door in a flourish. She was pretty, but older; definitely a mom.

“Hey, mum” Dan greeted, going in to give his mom a hug. She held him a fraction of a second longer than Dan held her, and Phil shoved his hands into his pockets, making eye contact with the shrubs.

“Doing well in school?” She asked after finally pulling back. She tucked a stray strand of hair back from her face, and it was obvious where Dan got his good looks from. Objectively.

“Yeah, I guess” he stuttered for a brief moment. “Uh, mom,” he grabbed Phil by the arm then, not so gently yanking him out of the shadows he appeared to be hiding in, “this is Phil, my boyfriend” and there was the extra emphasis on boyfriend.

“Pleased to meet you, Phil,” Dan’s mom held out her hand, and Phil shook it. “Oh, you’re so handsome. Daniel really does have good taste!” She laughed briskly, and Phil took back his hand.

“Well, come inside, come inside” she stood back and allowed for the both of them to come in and out of the cold. “Daniel, your father is chatting with some friends in the lounge, be a dear and introduce your boyfriend, I’m sorry, Phil to him.”

“Of course,” Dan said, hand still planted firmly on Phil’s arm. It seemed like a habit of Dan’s, or maybe it was an impulse, but his hand slid from Phil’s upper arm down to his hand, where he twined their fingers together. His face was flushed already, and his palms seemed warm and on the verge of sweating. Phil squeezed his hand, and there was a part of Dan that relaxed a fraction.

Dan first lead Phil to a room full of older men and introduced Phil to his dad, who poured them both a glass of wine and congratulated Dan on what were apparently very high test scores. His eyes lingered over Phil while he talked, slightly swimming from the glass he held.

“And what do you go to school for?” He asked at one point, briskly and not exactly polite.

“Film and production,” Phil nodded, and it was like there was a switch in the air. “I got offered a job at a high end production company over the summer, which I spent in Ireland. It’s true what they say about the Irish country side.”

“Yeah?” Dan’s father raised an eyebrow.

“Apparently. I wouldn’t know, seeing as I was locked away in front of a computer screen for hours.” And there was a chuckle from his dad, an actual laugh. Phil never really joked in front of Dan, so he guessed he assumed the man had no sense of humor.

Wherever he was pulling his sudden charisma from, Dan’s family melted in his hands. After talking to Dan’s dad, they went on to meet his aunts, who cooed and pinched his face, his cousins, whom he was sure saw one slip a five pounder to another, and his neighbors. Each of them easily disarmed by Phil’s casual sense of humor and knack for conversation, leaving Dan to stand by his side, smiling and trying not to let his mouth hang open.

An hour and a half into the party, after his cheeks were stinging and his jaw sore from grinding his teeth, he once more grabbed Phil by the hand, pulling him upstairs towards his second story bedroom.

“I just,” he started, flopping down on his old bed, “there’s so many of them! And they all expect me to be so happy with passing one exam, or living away from home” he sighed, staring up at the ceiling.

Phil seemed to hesitate for a moment, shifting his weight from one foot to another, before deciding to sit down next to Dan on his bed. He tread lightly, only sitting on the edge and taking care not to upset his blankets.

“They didn’t seem that bad…”

“Oh, that’s because they loved you” Dan scoffed. “Where did that even come from? I never knew you were so…” he trailed off.

“I am a human, you know,” he said, crossing his legs. Dan caught Phil looking around his room then, and he was reminded it was starkly different from the monochrome area he kept at school. There was a My Chemical Romance poster on one wall, an anime poster on another. Stacks of DVDs and games were piled high, and Guitar Hero controllers were shoved into their own corner, between his desk and his bookshelf, stuffed with Harry Potter books and the like.

“Never knew you were a fan of video games…” His blue eyes swept over the walls, taking in the clutter and mess, “or Death Note. Why did you never say anything? Am I that intimidating?”

“Did you see my family?” Dan raised an eyebrow, rolling onto his side towards Phil. Maybe the bed was old, and maybe it dipped, that was Dan’s reasoning as to why he seemed to shift closer to his roommate. “It’s not proper, not respectable. How many lawyers out there do you think like anime? Or Final Fantasy?”

Phil shrugged, standing up from the bed, “I’m sure there’s at least some. What’s this?” He pointed to a square mound, covered in old clothes and school books. It was dusty and faded, and looked like an old wardrobe.

“Oh!” Dan jumped up as Phil sent a book balanced on it tumbling to the ground. “Be careful with that, it’s old!”

“Is this…?”

“A piano, yeah…Given to me by my nan…” After a second of rearranging and doing some hasty tetrising, Dan raised the fallboard, revealing a row of faded, yellowing keys.

“I actually learned,” he chuckled to himself, more in the memory now than in his bedroom, “because my theatre teacher, she couldn’t play piano for shit. So she assigned me to play for the school concert, and I was forced to learn Twinkle Twinkle Little Star whilst all the other kids learned a silly dance routine.” Dan smiled fondly, touching a key. It was dusty, neglected without him there to take care of it.

“Play me something, yeah?” Phil asked softly, just enough to make Dan jump.

“Um, I don’t know,” he ran his hands over the keys, his fingers leaving fanned out tracts in the dust, “what would you want to hear?”

Phil shrugged, still watching Dan over his shoulder, “Whatever you want to play.”

There was a Muse poster on his wall, right across from the foot of his bed. Dan was confident then, wiggling his fingers before “Come waste your millions here…” Phil picked up right away, the first Muse song he ever heard. The piano in the song was beautiful, imaginative and expressive in ways Dan could only hope to aspire to.

Phil sung the lyrics flawlessly, right up until the chorus, where Dan fumbled the notes and the song came to a crashing halt. Phil didn’t seem to mind, for some reason. He instead watched Dan flex his fingers, curl them into a fist before relaxing them on the yellowing keys.

“Told you I wasn’t that good…” He muttered.

“Dan, that was…I was expecting Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, not, bloody hell, a real song.”

“I haven’t played in ages, though. A pianist isn’t exactly a lucrative career, in case you can’t tell.”

“This is all…” Phil turned and looked around the room again before flopping down once more on Dan’s bed, this time sitting all the way on it. “This is so much! I feel like I barely know you!”

Dan chuckled and sat down next to Phil on the bed, “Well, you kind of do, barely know me that is…”

“I know, and that baffles me! Like, God, Dan, what’s your favorite Final Fantasy game? What’s your favorite Muse album? What’s your favorite color? You’re telling me I have been living with you for months and didn’t know any of this about you?” Phil was very close to Dan, smiling and wide-eyed, like a child who had discovered their Christmas presents early. Dan should have been creeped out, should have pushed him away like everyone else, but there was something, something about the way the fairy lights outside caught his eyes that had him laying back on his bed, staring at the ceiling once again.

“Final Fantasy VII, Origin of Symmetry, and black, but, kind of secretly, yellow, like a sunrise. Don’t tell anyone ‘round campus, I can’t compromise my cool, apathetic exterior by letting others know I love the color yellow.”

Phil made a zipping motion in front of his mouth, “My lips are sealed.” He mimed throwing away a key. Dan giggled, and watched as crow’s feet appeared around the corners of Phil’s eyes when he did so.

“Oh all right, now you, come on.” He rested his hands on his stomach.

“Final Fantasy VII, of course,” Phil flopped back on the bed next to Dan, and Dan nodded.

“The best game.”

“Right? Okay, um, best Muse album? I love Origin of Symmetry, but I’m a sucker for the classics. Gotta go with Showbiz.”

“I guess you can’t always be right.” Dan snarked, and Phil rolled over and lightly punched his arm. He stayed that way, rolled over and facing Dan, as he answered his next question.

“And I like the color green. It reminds me of the holidays my family took when I was little, out to the countryside where my grandmother and grandfather lived. Tons of rolling hills, cows, horses, the ocean. If you like sunsets, you would like it out there.”

Dan rolled over and faced Phil as well, features shroud in the darkness of the room save for the aforementioned Christmas lights. It felt right, looking at Phil like that, like he was wearing rose-tinted glasses, and Phil, he was glowing. He looked younger in the light, more Dan’s age than four years older. “Tell me more about it…”

“It’s right on the coast, right up where the northern accents become markedly more Tolkien than English,” they both chuckled, “it smells great out there, I guess that’s because the air is so clean. There’s no civilization for miles, but it’s kind of nice, being able to see the stars at night.”

“Yeah, here you get about three on a good night…” Dan paused, “If we were friends, could I visit there with you?”

“Oh, please do!” Phil nodded, and Dan knew his face visibly lit up. It was a little hard to care in the darkness, though. “You know that part where I said there's no signs humanity for miles? Yeah…I think someone to talk to me about anime could help keep me sane.”

“You mean the cows don’t know anything about Soul Eater?”

“No, they only watch Naruto, the casuals.”

There should have been laughter then, too, but there was none. Instead, a soft silence washed over them, the two of them facing each other on Dan’s small bed, their dress shirts wrinkling underneath them on the fresh sheets. Dan had a way about him, viewing people more as puzzle pieces than anything. Right corner his parents, left-centre his uni friends, but Phil? Phil had always been a blank piece, and Dan always assumed that was because he knew nothing about him. But now? Phil slot right into place in his room, but his canvas was still blank, unreadable to Dan. Something about this fact made Dan’s body feel lighter, in the best way possible.

“You know, you don’t have to actually do my laundry when we get back to school…” Phil murmured.

“No, you kept up your end of the deal, now I gotta keep up mine,” Dan smiled, “besides, I owe you one, dealing with my family and all.”

“Mmm,” Phil hummed, and then moved forward. Their noses brushed, and a soft puff of air hit Dan’s lips and Phil whispered, “Is this…?” The bed creaked between them.

“Yeah,” Dan nodded, and closed the space between them. Kissing Phil marked the blank canvas a bit, a bright yellow smudge on the horizon. Maybe with time, he could figure out exactly where Phil went. Time, and a bit more kissing.

Dan was the first to pull back from where their lips met, the two of them grinning widely. Dan knew his cheeks would hurt soon, but he couldn’t help it. He had just kissed Phil, his roommate. Coffee-addled, senior Phil, and he had liked it.

“Now we’re even” Phil spoke up, pressing another quick kiss to his lips.

Dan rolled his eyes, playfully shoving Phil, “At least let me buy you dinner. You know, I hear the McDonald’s near the London Eye is great this time of night.”

“Dan Howell,” Phil gasped in mock horror, “are you suggesting we cut your parents' Christmas party?”

“And that we have dinner next to the London Eye together? That’s exactly what I’m suggesting.”

Phil sat up, leaning over Dan with a careful smile on his face. There was a restraint in his eyes, and a shyness too that was quickly melting away, warming his blue eyes. “And what exactly are we going to tell your parents, pray tell?”

Dan sat up too, cocking his head and taking Phil’s hand in his own, “That I’m going out into London with my boyfriend, that’s what.”

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave a kudos if you liked this, it means so much! 
> 
> Also, feel free to follow my writing tumblr @poisonwrites for updates, questions, and waffley posts!
> 
> Thanks xx


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